beating the heat in Yokohama

It has been a hot few months in most parts of the world this year. In Japan, it's been blindingly, gaspingly hot. Apparently this is fairly normal here. During the sweltering rainy season, I laughed when I was told that summer season wouldn't officially start until Marine Day on July 19th. But as the moisture cleared and was replaced by a relentless, beating sunshine starting at 4am every morning (meaning that by 9am it's about 98 degrees Fahrenheit outside) the reality of the situation began to sink in.

It's been this way every summer for centuries here, and given the necessity of leaving air-conditioned spaces the Japanese have figured out a lot of additional ways to deal with the hot summer sun - some very old and some new. I'm surprised more of these devices haven't caught on in the Southern U.S. Here are a few:

* futuristic-looking, mist-emitting architecture on my local outdoor shopping street
* hand fans, folding and otherwise. Traditional, practical and portable. Also sometimes free, when emblazoned with ads.
* umbrellas and parasols - using your umbrella on a dry day may sound silly, but it makes a lot of sense when the temperature difference between shade and sunshine is vast.
* neck-cooling collars
* restaurants and shops that blast the AC into the street through open doors (??)
* covered walkways and shopping arcades (also crucial during rainy season)
* mentholated cooling shirt spray (here's one user's review)
* ice-cold beverage vending machines on every corner. And I mean every. corner.
* soft-serve ice cream in every flavor and combination you can possibly imagine: canteloupe, green tea, ramune soda, apricot, black sesame, and apparently even cuttlefish. Check out the Japanese Ice Cream blog for more.
* arcwelder-style full-face sun visors
* elbow-length gloves -- okay, so on a comfort level this has always baffled me, but it does help prevent sunburn.

There's a nice Japan Times piece on some more of the more newfangled heat-beating products you can find at your local Japanese convenience store. As I sit here in my muggy apartment covered in sweat I'm rather excited to try some of these out.

rural towns + contemporary art in Japan

I was in the midst of another post about beating the heat in Yokohama when our friend Stanley Murashige passed along this New York Times article about a small Japanese village's attempts to attract tourism by combining its rice paddies with a little genetic modification. The story's quite bittersweet, though the end result is pretty arresting.

Inakadate's plight is part of a larger national trend of rural depopulation as birthrates decline and young people flock to bigger cities for job opportunities. The interesting side of this otherwise unfortunate situation is that small towns have become the new alternative spaces for contemporary art, with residency programs and site-specific projects popping up all over the place. Japan's commercial gallery system - which usually requires artists to pay gallery rent and watch over the space during visiting hours - is too expensive for many artists here, and many are heading for the hills (literally) to make art where space is more plentiful, cost of living is cheap, and the towns are rich in local tradition and ancient history. Arts tourism has become the new hope for many small towns, even if terms like "sound art" or "social engagement" aren't part of the local vocabulary. One great example of this phenomenon is the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial, which features installation by a host of internationally-acclaimed artists every three years, accompanied by experiential art hotels and innovative eateries that incorporate the talents and tastes of local residents. I really hope to get to visit one of these years. It's also the idea behind the Setouchi Art Festival I just returned from, which launched this year to much fanfare, and rightly so.

Will contemporary art help preserve rural Japan? Only time will tell. Either way, here's hoping that the village of Inakada manages to continue supporting its residents, with or without the rice-paddy graphics.

Inakadate image (above) borrowed from the NY Times; photo of Sue Pedley installation at Setouchi Festival (at right) taken by me.

my new favorite summer dessert thing

Welll, it's hard to top the reigning champion, black-sesame soft serve, but give kuzukuri noodles on ice with sweet dipping sauce (kuzukuri no kuromitsu) a try. Kuzukuri is made from arrowroot starch. Cut into wide, flat noodles for this dish, it's crystal clear and totally flavorless... but then you dip those noodles in "dark honey" or brown sugar dipping sauce, and slurp them up like they're sweet, ice-cold udon. Mmmm.

In some areas, a variation of this dish is made with tokoroten, a seaweed-based version of gelatin made from agar.

Mad props to Georg K. for suggesting I try these. Totally unlike anything I've ever eaten, and a completely addictive summer treat. To think I was going to go for the cheesecake! Time to get a jelly-noodle press. Here's a how-to for the tokoroten version, which yields thinner noodles:

I heart bath + art

Even in this sweaty summer weather, a good soak at a sento or onsen is one of my favorite Japanese traditions. It's refreshing, relaxing, and often comes with a surprise or two - like the electrified bath I accidentally slid into in Kyoto once, or the three gripping volumes of Keitae Kurono's manga Dragon Head that I found in the comfy post-bath relaxation room of my hotel's rooftop tub.

Imagine how pleased I was, then, to take a break from the heat in artist Shinro Ohtake's sento on Naoshima Island. I (heart) Yu, the "yu" being the Japanese kanji character for hot bath water, is both a multimedia installation and a fully-functioning public bathhouse, where locals and tourists alike let their hair down and soak away the stress of the day.

Forgot your towel and your soap? Well that's okay: the vending machine out front will dispense a ticket for your choice of colorful souvenir bath sets starting at just about 500 yen (that's $5 or so, depending on the exchange rate).

For obvious reasons I was unable to take photos inside the space itself, but hopefully the poster of the men's side (above) will give you a sense. Every inch of the space was packed with Ohtake's signature work, from the video installations inset in the changing-room benches to the object-filled knobs on the showers and elaborately-decorated porcelain of the toilets to the stained glass and the montaged structure of the building itself.

After a refreshing soak I felt rejuvinated enough for some midday hiking around Naoshima's incredible Benesse House museum and some of the site-specific works they've got studding the island. Curious to know more about I heart Yu? Check out this great interview with Ohtake about the bathhouse courtesy of the Japan Times.

artists you should know about part II: Yumiku Utsu

I stumbled across Yumiku Utsu's photography three times tonight during a visit to the excellent art bookstore/gallery Nadiff in Tokyo, and I'm so glad I did.

First I noticed her visceral depictions of eroticized shellfish and walnuts in the Australian food-as-art mag Condiment, which is well worth a look in and of itself.

Then I noticed a poster hanging near the gallery entrance of the eerie-looking cat photograph below (spoiler: not the cat's real eyes).

Finally I came across her totally sexy full-color book Out of the Ark, which accompanied her solo show at Nadiff's G/P gallery in 2009. The catalogue contains hundreds of the most drippingly graphic combinations of insects, toys, seafood, chocolate, and found photography you can imagine - funny and gorgeous and disturbing all at once. What I really enjoy about her work is how skillfully she manages to merge two- and three-dimensional images with her camera, something I've been particularly interested in these days.

Thus far it looks like Out of the Ark is only available in Japan, but here's hoping that it - and Utsu's work- finds itself overseas soon. Thus far Utsu has had shows in Budapest, Korea, China and her native Japan, but no U.S. appearances to date. Curators take note!

lost and found

In many locales it's common enough to see a lost mitten or other small item placed on a fencepost for the owner to reclaim.

In Tokyo this kind gesture is taken a step or two further: find a protective plastic bag, some packing tape, a scrap of paper and a marker to make a handmade sign reading " LOST ITEM," then post your package near where said item was found. The child's shoe here was found hung on a residential street near Nippori station. Sadly a week or so after this photo was taken and the owner had not yet returned for it. Anyone missing a little pink shoe?

Also lost/found in this neighborhood were a frilly black broken parasol carefully draped over a rail, and a tiny sock with cherries printed on it, perched on a tree branch.

Field Trip: Kyoto and the Seto Islands

Okay, I'm back after a long and lovely trip to visit Kyoto with my visiting family and then on to the Setouchi Contemporary Art festival in the Seto Inland Sea area. We arrived in Kyoto only to discover that we'd unwittingly scheduled our trip smack dab in the middle of Gion Matsuri , one of Japan's biggest summer festivals. I've never seen Kyoto so packed with kimono-wearing festival-goers! It was a great chance to catch some DIY fireworks along the river and the big traditional parade, with towering and elaborate floats on immense wooden wheels, pulled by sweating men in the hot Kyoto sun.

After a lot of eating delicious food and visiting our favorite shrines, temples, bamboo forests and courtyard gardens, my parents split off to visit friends in Fukuoka and we hopped on a train to Takamatsu to visit to the Setouchi Island Festival. What an incredible way to see contemporary art! Setouchi invites notable contemporary artists from across the world to create site-specific projects in the ruins of old abandoned homes, ports and hillsides of the tiny rural islands dotting Japan's inland sea. For visitors, it's a sweaty, nature-filled scavenger hunt for experiential art up ancient hills and coastal towns that show evidence of human habitation dating back 9,000 years. There's far too much to squeeze into a single post. More on some of the highlights very soon.